The ‘work of the break’ is Barthes’s astonishing study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine, S/Z (1970). The literary work is now no longer treated as a stable object or delimited structure, and the language of the critic has disowned all pretentions to scientific objectivity. The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read but those which are ‘writable’ (scriptable) – texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer. It is not exactly as though ‘anything goes’ in interpretation, for Barthes is careful to remark that the work cannot be got to mean anything at all; but literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport. The ‘writable’ text, usually a modernist one, has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is plural and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers, a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through, through which the critic may cut his own errant path. There are no beginnings and no ends, no sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual ‘levels’ to tell you what is more or less significant. All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of ‘influence’ but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such thing as literary ‘originality’, no such thing as the ‘first’ literary work: all literature is ‘intertextual’. A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the ‘death of the author’ is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim. 1 The biography of the author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special privilege: this text too can be deconstructed. It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming ‘polysemic’ plurality, not the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicity of the text is momentarily focused, it is not the author but the reader.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory – An Introduction, pp 137-138.